Our flight was at 9:45 am; Moorthy received a message in the morning saying the wifi on the flight wouldn’t work. We thought it may take close to an hour and a half to get to JFK airport, but the Uber managed to zip through in 50 minutes – barely any traffic on this Saturday morning. Alaksan airlines was from Terminal 7, and unlike the usual expectation of heavy rush in the security line, this one was breezy – terminal 7 had many carriers that I hadn’t heard about, and they were all domestic.
What’s a cortado?
Moorthy advised us to download audiobooks, podcasts, or movies so we would not feel bored during the flight. The flight duration was an estimated 8 hours, but we’d reach Anchorage at 1:30 pm local time – start at 10 am and reach at 1 pm with the whole day left to spare is a bonus in travel. New York is in the Eastern time zone, while Alaska is in the Alaskan time zone. So 8:30 am in New York is 4:30 am in Anchorage. I later found that the state of Alaska itself has 2 time zones – but as part of our trip, we’d never get so far out west to enter their 2nd time zone. Alaska is the biggest US state.
Since there was time for boarding, we went around the terminal searching for food options – there were a few eateries clustered in one section where we also ordered sandwiches and coffee. Rakesh ordered a cortado – this is something that he found in New Jersey where the size of a cortado would be a lot less compared to other coffees – cortados were served in small cups. After billing, when we went to the area where the coffee was being prepared, the Indian lady at the counter asked, “Do you know what is a cortado?” He replied affirmatively. And then she said, “Many people don’t know what it is. Do you know?” she asked again, and he replied that he did and that it’s made with less milk. Cortado has an equal amount of milk and espresso. But what Rakesh got was definitely not cortado – it was served in a large cup and way more milkier than he was expecting; it was like a latte.
“She obviously doesn’t know what a cortado is!”
After wrapping our breakfast, we headed to the boarding gate; there was a board that explained the practice of overbooking on flights; guess it was better to do an online check-in just to ensure you have a seat and don’t have a surprise in the airport. We thought the flight may not be full since how many people would there be travelling to Alaska, and that too on this one flight that was so long and non-stop. We were wrong – the flight was almost packed.
But what was nice about the flight was that the seats in economy were better than economy seats on other flights – I had enough legroom that my knee wasn’t pressing against the seat in front. There was a USB charging port and a small latch at the back of every seat that could support a handheld device if you wanted to watch a movie.
It was only after the flight started moving that Raghav noticed the safety card, which said this was a Boeing 737 Max – and that was when I realized that this happened to be the same airline where there was the recent incident of the door falling off when the flight was in the air; and Boeing’s 737 Max had a couple of fatal crashes a few years earlier that brought it in the limelight. Well, it was truly too late for us to make any changes to our decision now!
During the flight, the air hostess came around 3 times, serving drinks and a couple of biscuits – nothing fancy here, but they did have a separate menu for a few more items that you could pay and buy – Moorthy tried one which was a type of cheese platter. We sort of assumed that alcohol would be charged (at least that’s what it seemed to indicate in the inflight menu) while other drinks like soda and fruit juice were free; Rakesh asked for an alcoholic beverage, and the hostess gave a small glass bottle and water and didn’t ask for any payment. Perhaps one drink was free. Since I had asked for water more than a couple of times, the air hostess gave me a 1-litre cardboard water bottle instead of pouring out cups each time I asked!
It was in the second half of the flight while reading the flight booklet, that I discovered they had a streaming entertainment service – wifi was charged extra (and maybe the message they sent earlier in the day was about the paid wifi not being available), but their inflight entertainment was available; you could use your own device to access it. They had a bunch of movies and some TV shows. “Freud’s Last Session” caught my eye – because of the actor playing Freud and the premise of Sigmund Freud meeting author CS Lewis to debate the existence of God. I could only get through half the movie since I started this late. The second half would have to wait.
We knew when the flight was above Alaska because you could see snow-capped mountains and glaciers from the flight itself. It looked pretty from above. We had a smooth landing, and even from within the airport, when you looked outside through the windows, you could see the snow-capped mountains at a distance.
The Ted Stevens Anchorage airport felt a little more homely than most other airports – maybe because of the way it was decorated inside or the lighting inside, or maybe just the unique artefacts you found on the floor or ceilings.
As we followed the directions to the rental cars section, Raghav exclaimed, “There’s the first bear – the polar bear.” A life-size statue of a white polar bear stood on its legs, ready to pounce.
The white bears also look cute, but apparently they are the most dangerous and largest in size!
We went down a long pathway with posters and artefacts about Alaska on both walls and finally came into a bright area with many rental counters.